A Writer's Life (60 page)

A year later, more affluent than he imagined he would ever be, he flew with his friend to the United States, arriving at JFK. After sleeping for three nights on airport benches without being queried by security personnel, Konstantin and his companion rode the subway into Queens and rented an apartment in a neighborhood that had many Russian-speaking residents. Later in the year, on his own, Konstantin moved into an East
Village apartment and found a job in a floral shop in the West Twenties that was managed by a Polish man who spoke Russian no better than Konstantin spoke Polish, but they communicated well enough to work together. Konstantin remained on the job for nearly three years, meanwhile gaining fluency in English, and, after taking six hundred dollars from his savings, he registered for classes at a training school for waiters and bartenders on Seventh Avenue near Thirty-seventh Street. His first restaurant job was in a French bistro on First Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, near the Queensboro Bridge. A year later, in 1995, he was waiting tables in the Museum of Modern Art's restaurant on West Fifty-third Street, and in 1996 he found work at the newly opened Tucci, where he met Andy Globus and moved uptown to share Globus's apartment.

Even before I had begun talking at length to Konstantin, I felt as if I had met one of his spiritual kinsmen in the character of the exiled Russian waiter named Boris, whom George Orwell had written about a half-century earlier in
Down and Out in Paris and London
. Like Konstantin, Boris had spent part of his youth in the Russian army. Boris had served during World War I as a captain, until his rank and income had been eliminated by the Communists during the Revolution, whereupon Boris fled to Paris and, being impecunious and reduced at times to sleeping under the bridges of the Seine, he struggled to support himself as a waiter.

“ ‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman,' ” Boris was quoted in Orwell's book as telling his fellow waiters, most of whom were Italian or German. “There is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris,” Orwell wrote, although he conceded that when a man becomes a waiter, he tends to forget his origins and dwells in a world of illusions. “He lives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables, listens to their conversation, sucks up to them with smiles and discreet little jokes,” Orwell wrote. “He has the pleasure of spending money by proxy.… He will take pains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he is participating in the meal himself.” Orwell went on to write about Boris: “Though he had never saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich.”

Konstantin had similar aspirations in New York, which he often expressed to me as we sat together at midday in Tucci's dining room, both of us folding napkins and stuffing newly printed menus into plastic covers. “I will one day own a great restaurant,” he assured me, adding confidentially that he had already met some wealthy New Yorkers who were eager to finance him whenever he was ready to venture out on his own. His personable manner helped him make friends easily at the health club and
wherever he associated socially, and it seemed to me that he was the most optimistic of the Tucci employees. It also struck me as ironic that this ex-soldier from the Red Army who had witnessed the crumbling of communism in his homeland would be envisioning his capitalistic ascendancy in the food business while working in this restaurant site, which had known so many failures and foreclosures.

Still, he arrived for work every day in high spirits and was dressed for success in Armani-style suits that he had purchased on sale. In the evenings, his face flushed and his muscles pumped up as a result of his late-afternoon workout, he moved swiftly around the dining room in his waiter's attire, catering to his customers efficiently and obligingly. “I really like working at Tucci,” Konstantin told me one day.

It was not long after my conversation with Konstantin that I learned from Gerald Padian by telephone that he and his partners would be selling the restaurant within a few days. I should not have been surprised, but I was. I was also devastated. I had finally gotten my foot in the door, thanks to my relationship with Padian, and now he was leaving, and if I wanted to continue my research, I would have to try to ingratiate myself with a new group of restaurant owners—headed, according to Padian, by a wealthy man of Greek ancestry from Fort Lee, New Jersey. There was a good chance that Mr. Fort Lee would not want me hanging around his place all day, and then I'd be back to where I was before—a customer, this time at the
ninth
restaurant to open for business at 206 East 63rd Street.

“Is there any chance your deal will fail through?” I asked Padian hopefully.

“No, everything's set and we're signing the papers in my office on Monday,” he said, meaning March 10, 1997.

He had opened Tucci thirteen months before, in February 1996.

“Do you think that Konstantin and Andy Globus and the rest of them know about this?” I asked Padian.

“No,” he said, “and I'd appreciate it if you'd keep it to yourself until I tell them after dinner on Sunday night.”

“I thought your business was doing pretty well,” I said.

“It was,” Padian agreed, but he repeated what he had often told me before: It was very difficult and time-consuming to be simultaneously responsible for running a law firm
and
a restaurant. He also reminded me again that his days as a late-night bachelor were soon coming to a close—he was getting married in less than two months and, since he was approaching the age of thirty-five, he believed that he was ready for a home life; and he went on to explain that, inasmuch as none of the other Tucci backers were willing or able to assume the leadership role of the
restaurant, he was receptive to the idea of selling the sublease to the 206 East 63rd Street space to the gentleman from Fort Lee. Padian meanwhile promised that he would remain in touch with me, and, before hanging up, he wished me the best of luck with my book.

Later that day, I received a note from my editor at Knopf, my publisher, asking that I bring him up-to-date on how my work was progressing. My editor had proven himself to be a man of infinite patience, but I knew that he would be feeling some anxiety when a writer was as tardy as I had been in giving him something to read. So I faxed him back with the promise that he would be receiving a written report from me in a day or so, and then I immediately began to review my voluminous notes entitled “Restaurants—a work in progress,” hoping to draw from this material a summarized account of what I was trying to accomplish and then describing it in an outline that I would send to my editor. I had not read through my research material in quite a while, and as I began to peruse it that evening and on the following morning, picking my way through hundreds of pages of typed notes that were spread out along the two tables that flanked my desk, I realized that I had gathered lots of information that I had forgotten I had collected. Some of it was in the form of extraneous data and detail about Elaine's or the “21” Club or other restaurants that were not central to my main interest, and there were also many references to what other writers had published in the past about the restaurant business and dining in general, I had excerpted paragraphs from Joseph Wechsberg's biography of Le Pavilion's owner, Henri Soulé, including the latter's remark that a restaurant's success was very much influenced by the presence of beautiful women. I had paraphrased an observation made in a novel by Philip Roth to the effect that Jewish people liked dining in Chinese restaurants because Chinese waiters could never tell whether or not the customers were Jewish. From a book by Truman Capote I had reprinted a comment made by one of his characters, Lady Ina Coolbirth, who, while having lunch with a friend at La Côte Basque, remarked, “There is at least one respect in which the rich, the really very rich,
are
different.… They understand vegetables. Other people—well, anyone can manage roast beef, a great steak, lobsters. But have you ever noticed how, in the homes of the very rich, at the Wrightsmans' or Dillons', at Bunny's and Babe's, they always serve only the most beautiful vegetables, and the greatest variety? The greenest petits pois, infinitesimal carrots, corn so baby-kerneled and tender it seems almost unborn, lima beans tinier than mice eyes, and the young asparagus! the limestone lettuce! the raw red mushrooms! zucchini.…” I also included in my notes from Capote's book his demurral, “Champagne does have one serious draw-back
back: swilled as a regular thing, a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.…”

Some of what I found within my stacks of research had
not
been placed there with the intention of including it in my book. It was, instead, a private account of my state of mind during the days and months that I had been gathering information, a kind of diary that revealed my personal thoughts and impressions about the people I was interviewing and the places I had been and my ongoing doubts, vacillations, and rationalizations about the work I was trying to do.

“Why in the hell do I remain involved in matters of such dubious interest as the Willy Loman Building and all these retro restaurants on Sixty-third Street?” I asked myself in a memo, and I questioned myself further:

“Has the waywardness of my own life made me compatible with the floundering forces that apparently guide this place?…

“When I started delving into the origins of the building's ownership was I exploring the possibility, illogically but inexorably, that hidden in the history of Schillinger's warehouse was evidence of an unfortunate incident or misadventure that might help to explain the legacy of lost causes inherited later by the restaurateurs? And, furthermore, might these revelations point to a theme that underlies my new book?

“Possible title for the book: ‘We Shall Now Praise Unfamous Men.'

“… Get serious.”

In another memo I asked myself some difficult questions and then replied in a way that made me feel better:

“Why am I not writing this book faster? Do I have ‘Writer's Block'? No, you're not suffering from ‘Writer's Block,' you're just showing good judgment in not publishing anything at this time. You're demonstrating concern for readers in not burdening them with bad writing. More writers should be doing what you're doing—NOT writing. There's so much bad writing out there, why add to it? The bookshelves of America are lined with the second-rate work of first-rate writers. Many of these writers have a built-in audience and so the editors will publish their stuff. They'll publish whatever sells. But the writers should be blocked. It would be a good thing for the writers' reputations, for the publishers' production costs, and for the reading standards of the general public. There should be a National Book Award given annually to certain writers for NOT WRITING.”

Another memo to myself contained a paragraph that I believed belonged in my restaurant book, if, of course, I ever wrote the book:

“Every day in the dining world there is somewhere a diaspora, a casting
out of cooks, and of waiters wearing clip-on bow ties, and of bartenders who will go to their graves knowing the favorite drinks of hundreds of customers—customers who never knew their bartenders' last names.…” And:

“The midday kisses exchanged between the maître d's and the ladies who lunch are quintessential manifestations of unfeit affection.…”

And there was another memo with questions that were repetitive of those asked elsewhere in my research files

“Where is the center point of your story? Is it ‘The Building' that you're writing about, or the Rise & Fall of the Retro Restaurants situated within the building?

“What is the connection between the building and its occupants other than the fact that Schillinger's workhorses and Tucci's kitchen workers occupied a common ground at opposite ends of the twentieth century?

“Why are you, who are supposed to be writing a personal book, devoting your attentions to this faithless piece of real estate at 206 E. 63rd?

“What's your response to these questions?

“Answer: I think that I cannot directly respond to these questions because the issue has less to do with the building and its occupants than with me and my natural, though at times misguided, affinity for people and places that exist in the shadows and side streets of the city and other overlooked places in which there are untold stories awaiting my discovery and development. Oh, I know this sounds grandiloquent, but considering where I come from, the distant dunes of South Jersey, where instead of reading childhood literature I scanned menus, and where my homelife was happiest when dining with my stylish mother and my relaxed and contented father in mediocre restaurants, is it any wonder that after moving to New York I would find comfort with, and compassion for, some of the city's unheralded and struggling restaurateurs and would moreover be inclined to become their chronicler? In addition, I must acknowledge something of a personal identity with the building at 206 E. 63rd—it has held its ground, as I have, during decades of urban renewal and changing trends in my neighborhood and, like me, it has so far survived the wrecking ball. The venerable building is unmentioned in the guidebooks of Old New York but at various times throughout the century it has provided shelter and sustenance for hundreds of people from all over the world. It was built by the German-born Frederick Schillinger and later passed into the hands of the Italianate teamster Frank Catalano, whose heirs subsequently leased it to the Anglo-American entrepreneur in Florida, J. Z. Morris, whose ex-wife from Hong Kong, Jackie Ho, presently assists him in the not-always-easy task of collecting the monthly rent from the alternating
restaurateurs whose employees have included a bus boy from Bangladesh, a cook from the Dominican Republic, and a waiter from Russia who fled his homeland to make his mark in this building that regularly reinvents itself and in which I must quickly find a worthy story to present to my editor.”